Folly Road
A craft beer brand identity for Wadworth's new brewhouse, built for drinkers its traditional ales weren't reaching
The horse came along for the ride
Industry
Food & Drink
Services
Brand Identity, Brand Guidelines
Completed at
Eleven Miles (now GAIN)
On 7 September 2023, two shire horses called Sam and George stood outside a converted warehouse on the edge of Devizes while the Mayor of Devizes cut a ribbon. Wadworth had brewed at its Grade II listed Northgate brewery since 1885, and this was the day it officially moved five minutes up the road. After the tour and the speeches, a new sign was unveiled. It read Folly Road, and there was a horse in it.
Most of the people drinking Wadworth were the ones who'd been ordering 6X for years, an amber ale with more than a century behind it. Younger drinkers were going elsewhere. Newer breweries were winning over millennials and Gen Z, and Wadworth's sales were falling.
The new brewhouse gave Wadworth a way back in. It could brew short runs of different styles and see what stuck, which the old building, with its 70-barrel minimum, couldn’t do. But a craft IPA is a hard sell to someone who's never ordered a Wadworth beer. So, Wadworth created a new brand. And they called it Folly Road.
As far from 6X as it could go
Wadworth's own brewery brand identity is built on heritage. Its pub signs are still hand-painted by the brewery’s own sign writer, and in 2023 it was one of the last breweries in the country delivering to its town pubs by shire horse and dray. Folly Road needed to be a bold departure from all of that, so the only thing it brought along was the horse, redrawn as a modern icon and set directly into the name.
The brief was open, and nothing got ruled out along the way. That left one real decision, which was how far from Wadworth to go. A half-step would have looked like 6X with a new label, and the audience Folly Road was for would have walked straight past it. So it went the whole way, keeping one small thread back to the brewery for anyone who knew where to look.
Around 10 other breweries went into the review first, and what they shared was attitude. Craft beer branding isn’t scared to break the rules, and a lot of its appeal is that it feels a bit rebellious. That settled the position. Folly Road would leverage it, and the brand would be built from type so each beer could take it somewhere new.
The logo takes a back seat
Folly Road was always going to be a family of beers, each with its own name and label, so the master brand had to be something every new beer could pick up and adopt. That's why the craft beer brand identity is mostly type. A typographic logotype translates well into different colours and layouts, and it leaves room for each label to do something different while still belonging to the same brewery.
The logotype is set in a condensed, flexible grotesque, and carries the name and the horse with very little else. The master brand is black and white. Each beer brings its own palette and Folly Road takes it on, which is how a stout and a session IPA can look nothing alike and still come from the same brewery.
The hardest piece was also the smallest. A keg font lens is the oval badge on the front of a bar tap, and an oval leaves very little room at the top and bottom for anything to sit comfortably.
People at a bar choose by style first, an IPA or a stout, and then by strength. So on the lens the style is the biggest thing, the ABV comes next, and the Folly Road logo takes a back seat, because that's the order people actually read it in.
From there the system went onto beer can design and signage. Beer label design started with Evolution, a 4.3% session IPA brewed to mark the opening and the first beer out of Folly Road Brewhouse. Because the system is typographic, the beers that came after, Crowd Surfer and Sun Burst among them, each got a label of their own and still sit comfortably next to Evolution on a bar.
Since the ribbon was cut
Folly Road Brewhouse now brews Wadworth's traditional ales and the Folly Road range side by side. The Folly Road beers are only poured in Wadworth's own pubs and sold in its brewery shop, so the lens on the tap does a lot of the selling.
Six more beers have come out under the brand since launch, with Evolution winning a silver medal at the 2024 World Beer Awards a few months after it first poured.
More recently, Wadworth renamed several of the beers by style. Evolution became Hazy IPA, and Corvus Stout became Nitro Stout.
More work
Overtone
